Michele Nijhuis reports for The New Yorker on a lawsuit against the federal government, alleging that the government’s action and inaction have so damaged the planet that they threaten the fundamental constitutional rights of life and liberty of the plaintiffs. Did we mention that these plaintiffs are teenagers?

21 young people, from nine to twenty years old, are part of a new lawsuit against the government, which claims that the U.S. government “violated the public-trust doctrine,” Nijhuis reports, “the principle, dating back to Roman law, that some resources cannot be appropriated by private interests and are instead held in trust by the government for public use.”